[Note: Difficulties with the sound system occurred
just a few sentences into the speech. Mr. Buchanan had to hold for minutes
with dozens of TV cameras waiting; ultimately he started again from the
beginning]. Good morning again
and happy Saint Crispin's Day and let's make a little history. Today,
I am ending my lifelong membership in the Republican Party, and my campaign
for its nomination; and I am declaring my intention to seek the nomination
of the Reform Party for the presidency of the United States. [applause,
chants of "Go Pat Go"].

This decision was not made without anguish and regret. I will forever
cherish the memory of having been perhaps the only Goldwaterite in the
graduating class of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University
in 1961. Nor will I ever regret my nine years of service to Richard Nixon,
from his comeback campaigns of 1966 and '68, to the great triumph, 49 states
in 1972, through the final tragic days of Watergate. I was with Nixon in
China. And I had the high honor of being Ronald Reagan's second in the
Panama Canal debates, and of being at his side when that great president
refused to give up missile defense for his country and walked out of the
summit at Reykjavik in Ronald Reagan's finest hour of the Cold War. [applause].
From the thunderous reception we got at Houston in 1992, when I told the
Buchanan Brigades we had to come home and stand beside George Bush, to
the ovations at Ames this summer last, when I faced off with his son, the
Governor, the Republican party has been good to me. And I have tried to
be loyal to it. But, as John F. Kennedy said, Sometimes party loyalty asks
too much. And today it asks too much of us. [applause].

Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system
is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have
become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey. [applause].
On foreign and trade policy, open borders and centralized power, our Beltway
parties have become identical twins. Both supported NAFTA and GATT and
the surrender of American sovereignty to the World Trade Organization.
Both supported the extension of nuclear war guarantees right up to the
borders of Russia. Both supported the illegal war in Serbia.[applause].
Both support IMF bailouts of corrupt and even criminal regimes. Both voted
for MFN trade privileges for a Communist China that is right now pointing
missiles at our own country, the United States of America.
[applause]. So, let me say to the leaders of those two parties
in Washington, DC, the appeasement of Beijing is a bipartisan disgrace,
and we will not be a party to it. [applause, chants
"Go Pat Go"].

Neither party speaks for the forgotten Americans whose jobs were sent
overseas to finance the boom market of the 1990s that the rest of us enjoy.
Both parties are addicted to soft money. Both write laws with corporate
lobbyists looking over their shoulder. Both embrace the amoral and unprincipled
politics of triangulation. And neither fights today with conviction
and courage to rescue God's country from the cultural and moral pit into
which she has fallen. [applause].

The day of the outsider is over in the Beltway parties; the money men
have seen to that. Never again will our political establishment permit
a dissident to come as close to capturing a nomination as we did in 1996.
They have rearranged the primary schedules and rigged the game to protect
the party favorites.[applause].

Candidates of ideas need not apply, as both parties, both parties seek
out the hollow men, the malleable men, willing to read from teleprompters
speeches scripted by consultants and pollsters to whom the latest read-out
from the Focus Group is sacred text. [applause].

And we choose not to play our assigned walk-on role in their sham election.
[applause,
chants "Go Pat Go"]. We just started going here friends. [chants
continue]. My friends, this year I believe is our last chance to
save our republic before she disappears into the godless New World Order
that our elites are constructing in betrayal of everything for which our
Founding Fathers fought and lived and died.

Only the Reform Party offers the hope of a real debate and a real choice
of destinies for our country. [applause].
"If we don't go now, Pat," I have been told by loyalists all across America,
"every cause for which we fought for seven years will die." Well, we can't
let those causes die, because they are America's cause. So let me say to
the money boys and the Beltway elites who think that, at long last, they
have pulled up their drawbridge and locked us out forever: You don't know
this peasant army. [applause]. We have not
yet begun to fight. [applause, chants "Go Pat Go"].

So, let me lay out our Patriots' Road for America. With the Cold War
over, we shall craft a foreign policy for a new century rooted in the great
tradition of Washington, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams who wrote:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence...shall be
unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers
be....But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

I pledge to you: I will never send an American army to fight in a foreign
war, unless our country is attacked or our vital interests are imperiled.
[applause].
They call us "isolationists." And that's one of the nicest things they
call us. [laughter].
They call us isolationists.
Well, if they mean I intend to isolate America from all the bloody territorial
and ethnic wars of the new century, I plead guilty. [applause].
It is the first duty of a statesman: to keep his countries out of wars
that are not his country's quarrels. And the junk yards of history are
strewn with the wreckage of republics and empires that failed to heed that
lesson.

We intend to dust off an ancient document and restore it to its rightful
place as the altar piece of American government. You may have heard of
it. It is called the Constitution of the United States. [applause].
Under that Constitution, before America goes to war, the Congress must
declare war. By my reading of that Constitution, the soldiers and sailors
and airmen and Marines of the United States are never to be the imperial
troops of anybody's New World Order. [applause, chants
"Go Pat Go"]. We will bring our soldiers home where they belong;
and rebuild our military might and morale so no nation will dare attack
us.

And the first step to restore that morale is to evict from the Bully
Pulpit of the Oval Office, our own Elmer Gantry, Mr. Clinton [laughter],
whose desecration of the temples of our civilization and personal misconduct,
disqualify him and make him unfit to be the Commander in Chief of the Armed
Forces of the United States. [applause].

We Americans are a good and generous people. Our tradition of
being first at the scene of natural disasters anywhere in the world, providing
food and shelter for its victims, that is rooted in deep our hearts. That
great tradition we shall maintain. But IMF bailouts of deadbeat dictators
will end; and we must phase out foreign aid and start looking out for the
forgotten Americans right here in the United States. [applause].

It is time for a New Patriotism, where America's sovereignty is wholly
and fully restored. And if, as Secretary General Kofi Annan has threatened
us, we will lose our vote in the United Nations, if we don't give him the
billion dollars he says we owe him, I would give Mr. Kofi this word of
advice: Sir, don't go there. [laughter, applause].
Because
if our vote in the UN is in jeopardy, your lease on Turtle Bay is in jeopardy.

As for America's monstrous trade deficits, even Mr. Greenspan is now
alarmed, as they approach four percent of our entire economy. Because of
NAFTA and GATT, America's industrial base has been hollowed out, our manufacturing
workers, who have to support families on a single wage, have been forced
to compete with sweatshop labor; and our country has been left dependent
on imports for the vital necessities of its national life.

We must cut out these cancerous deficits and make America a self-reliant
nation again. [applause]. And to those
who prattle on about our obligations and debts to the Global Economy--
[microphone
cuts out, again].

[After a bit more than two minutes, the problem
is fixed]. ...Let me go back and say we're going to cut out
these cancerous trade deficits and make America a self-reliant nation again.
And to those who prattle on about our debts and obligations to the Global
Economy, let me repeat again what I've said before: I'm not running for
president of the world; I'm running for president of the United States.
[applause,
chants "Go Pat Go"]. I want to tell
you network fellows that what's been knocking out these microphones is
all that applause we've been getting, all right.

But of all the needs of this nation, none is greater for our peace and
happiness than racial reconciliation. The backsliding toward hyphenated-Americanism
must end. [applause]. Let us abolish quotas
and set-asides, these un-American devices that reward people based on the
color of their skin, or what continent their kinfolk came from. Let us
abandon a sterile and futile politics of victims-and-villains, and rediscover
what brings us all together as one nation and one people. All of us must
learn our English language. All of us must come to know our common history,
and heritage, and American heroes, so we can get our great American Melting
Pot doing its magic again. [applause]. Any
man or woman from any continent or any country can be a good American.
We know that. But it takes time to assimilate the thirty million folks
who have come here in the last thirty years. We need time to do that. Indeed,
we need a time-out on legal immigration, to ease the downward pressure
on workers' wages and to defeat the forces of separatism that threaten
us and nations all over the world.

This land is our land; it belongs to all of us, immigrant and native-born
alike; and it would be unpardonable ingratitude if we, the children of
pioneers and patriots of every color, creed and continent, lost this last
best hope of earth, because we could not learn to live with one another,
or could not learn to love one another. [applause].

If America stands for anything in this world, it is freedom. Yet today
America is among the most over-taxed, over-regulated, and over-governed
societies in history. Our Federal Government collects a fifth of all our
national wealth each year and controls almost half of it. Can anyone name
a single regulation that has been repealed in ten years, or a single agency
that has been abolished? ["No"]. Even
the National Endowment for the Arts soldiers defiantly on. [applause].

We need to restore the old constitutional division of labor in government.
Defense and foreign policy are the province of the federal government,
but welfare and education are the business of state and local governments.
[applause].
And in children's education, parents come first, teachers come second,
and federal judges not at all. [applause, chants
"Go Pat Go"]

Mr. Bush down there in Texas says his Department of Education will write
tests for fourth grade children in Idaho. But if I am elected president,
the bureaucrats at the Department of Education are not going to be testing
kids; they're going to be testing the magic of the market place. [applause].
And all federal money for the school children of America will be sent back
to the school districts of America, where accountability begins and authority
belongs. [applause].

We need a new Supreme Court where only constitutionalists need apply,
a court that will respect both states rights and human rights, that will
begin to undo the damage done this nation by judicial aggressions, beginning
with that abomination they call Roe v. Wade. [applause,
chants "Go Pat Go"].

We need a President and a Congress that will pick up the whip the Founding
Fathers left in Article III of the Constitution-to herd the justices back
into the narrow stalls to which they were first consigned by Hamilton and
Madison.

What is a self-governing people doing, meekly waiting each week for
nine jurists to tell us how we may live and how we should govern ourselves?
As our fathers threw off a tyranny of kings, let us throw off this tyranny
of judges and let America be America again. [applause].

As for our IRS tax code, it is an insult to a free people, the product
of an endless series of corrupt bargains between legislators and lobbyists.
Let us tear this weed out by its roots, cut taxes to the lowest level in
modern history, eliminate taxes on savers and small business, and shift
the burden where it belongs, on the backs of a global transnational elite
that has no loyalty to any country. [applause, chants
"Go Pat Go"].

For every tax on manufactured goods made in the U.S.A, let us put an
equal tax on foreign goods dumped in the U.S.A. For every tariff that China
puts on us, let's put an equal tariff on them. That way, Mr. Clinton's
principal campaign contributors down at the Chinese embassy can start help
paying for the Seventh Fleet. [applause, chants "Go
Pat Go].

Friends, ours is truly the best of times and the worst of times. With
our miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology, none of us
would want to go back to yesterday. But something good has been lost from
those years as well: The old patriotism, a popular culture that undergirded
the values of faith, family, and country, the idea that we Americans are
one people who sacrifice and suffer together, and go forward and progress
together, the mutual respect, the sense of limits, the good manners; all
are gone. My life has been spent in the great and good vocations of politics
and journalism and government. None commands the respect it once did; all
today are in disrepute.

I cannot think of a time since Watergate so poisoned with rancor and
hostility, and I don't know if any president can change that, the way Ronald
Reagan infused his times with that spirit of confidence and unabashed love
of country for which he became so famous. But I do know this: I will try.

America needs a Government of National Unity and Reconciliation that
draws from the best of all parties, and I promise you: I will create that
kind of government. And if we lead, they will follow, and if we build it,
they will come. [applause].

My friends, all the great empires of Europe that began our century so
full of swagger and bombast, all came crashing down in ruins. All are now
surrendering their independence and their identities to a super state in
Europe that pays homage to the great god Mammon. America alone yet endures,
independent and free. The great questions before us are these: Shall we,
too, yield to their temptation, follow their path, and suffer their fate?
Forbid it 'o mighty God. Is the call to empire irresistible? Is world government
inevitable? Or can America remain forever a light unto the nations, an
example to mankind of how a free people should govern themselves, a republic
above whose sovereignty stands the sovereignty of God alone.

This is our cause. And so it is that in the name of the Founding Fathers,
we go forth to rescue our lady America, and we will not quit this fight
as long as there is breath within us.

Good morning. Today, I am ending my lifelong membership in the Republican
Party, and my campaign for its nomination; and I am declaring my intention
to seek the nomination of the Reform Party for the presidency of the United
States.

This decision was not made without anguish and regret. I will forever
cherish the memory of having been perhaps the only Goldwaterite in the
Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in 1961. Nor will
I ever regret my nine years of service to Richard Nixon, from his comeback
campaigns of 1966 and '68, to our 49-state triumph of '72, through the
final days of Watergate. I was with Nixon in China. And I also had the
high honor of being Ronald Reagan's second in the Panama Canal debates,
and at his side when that great president refused to give up missile defense
and walked out of the summit at Reykjavik in Ronald Reagan's finest hour
of the Cold War. From the thunderous reception we got at Houston in 1992,
when I told the Buchanan Brigades we had to come home and stand beside
George Bush, to the ovations at Ames, Iowa, last summer, when I faced off
with his son, the Governor, the Republican party has been good to me. And
I have tried to be loyal to it. But, as John F. Kennedy said, Sometimes
party loyalty asks too much. And today it asks too much of us.

Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system
is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have
become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey. On foreign and trade
policy, open borders and centralized power, our Beltway parties have become
identical twins. Both supported NAFTA and GATT and the surrender of our
national sovereignty to the WTO. Both supported the extension of nuclear
war guarantees to the borders of Russia. Both supported the illegal war
on Serbia. Both support IMF bailouts of corrupt regimes. Both vote for
MFN trade privileges for a Communist Chinese regime that today targets
missiles on American cities. The appeasement of Beijing is a bipartisan
disgrace, and we will not be a part of it.

Neither party speaks for the forgotten Americans whose jobs were sent
overseas to finance the boom market of the 1990s that the rest of us enjoy.
Both parties are addicted to soft money. Both write laws with lobbyists
looking over their shoulders. Both embrace the unprincipled politics of
triangulation.

And neither fights today with conviction and courage to rescue God's
country from the cultural and moral pit into which she has fallen. The
day of the outsider is over in the Beltway parties; the money men have
seen to that. Never again will our political establishment permit a dissident
to come as close to capturing a nomination as we did in1996. They have
rearranged the primary schedule and rigged the game to protect the party
favorites.

Candidates of ideas need not apply, as both parties seek out the hollow
men, the malleable men, willing to read from teleprompters speeches scripted
by consultants and pollsters for whom the latest print-out from the Focus
Group is sacred text.

We choose not to play our assigned role in their sham election. My friends,
this year is our last chance to save our republic, before she disappears
into the godless New World Order that our elites are constructing in a
betrayal of everything for which our Founding Fathers lived, fought, and
died.

Only the Reform Party offers the hope of a real debate and a true choice
of destinies for our country. "If we don't go now, Pat," I have been told
by loyalists all across America, "every cause for which we fought for seven
years will die." Well, we can't let those causes die, because they are
America's cause. So let me say to the money boys and the Beltway elites
who think that, at long last, they have pulled up their drawbridge and
locked us out forever: You don't know this peasant army. We have not yet
begun to fight.

So, let me lay out our Patriots' Road for America. With the Cold War
over, we shall craft a foreign policy for a new century rooted in the great
tradition of Washington, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams who wrote:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence...shall be
unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers
be....But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

I pledge to you: I will never send an American army to fight in a foreign
war, unless our country is attacked or our vital interests are imperiled.
They call us "isolationists." Well, if they mean I intend to isolate America
from the bloody territorial and ethnic wars of the new century, I plead
guilty. It is the first duty of a statesman: to keep his country out of
wars that are not his country's quarrel. And the junk yards of history
are strewn with the wreckage of republics and empires that failed to learn
that lesson.

We intend to dust off an ancient document and restore it to its rightful
place as the altar piece of American government. You may have heard of
it. It's called the Constitution of the United States. Under the Constitution,
before America goes to war, the Congress must declare war. By my reading
of the Constitution, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who take
an oath of loyalty to the United States, are never to be used as the imperial
troops of anybody's New World Order. We will bring our soldiers home where
they belong; and rebuild our military might and morale so no nation will
dare attack us.

And the first step to restore that morale is to evict from the Bully
Pulpit of the Oval Office, our own Elmer Gantry, Mr. Clinton, whose desecration
of that temple of our civilization, and squalid behavior, render him unfit
to serve as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.

We Americans are a good and generous people. Our tradition of
being first at the scene of natural disasters, providing food and shelter
for the victims, is rooted in deep our hearts. That tradition we shall
maintain. But IMF bailouts of deadbeat dictators must end; and we must
phase out foreign aid and start looking out for the forgotten Americans
right here in the U.S.A.

It is time for a New Patriotism, where America's sovereignty is wholly
and fully restored. And if, as Secretary General Kofi Annan has threatened,
we will lose our vote in the United Nations, if we don't give him the billion
dollars he says we owe him, I would give Mr. Kofi this word of advice:
Sir, don't go there. Because if our vote in the UN is in jeopardy, your
lease on Turtle Bay is in jeopardy.

As for America's immense trade deficits, even Mr. Greenspan is now alarmed,
as they approach four percent of our entire economy. Because of NAFTA and
GATT, America's industrial base has been hollowed out, our manufacturing
workers, who support families on a single wage, have been forced to compete
with sweatshop labor abroad; and our country has been left dependent on
imports for the vital necessities of national life.

We must cut out these cancerous trade deficits and make America a self-reliant
nation again. And to those who prattle on about out duties to the Global
Economy, let me say it again: I'm not running for president of the world;
I'm running for President of the United States.

But of all the needs of this nation, none is greater for our peace and
happiness than racial reconciliation. The backsliding toward hyphenated-Americanism
must end. Let us abolish quotas and set-asides, these un-American devices
that reward individuals based on what color they are, or what continent
their kinfolk came from. Let us abandon a sterile and futile politics of
victims-and-villains, and rediscover what brings us all together as one
nation and one people. All of us must learn our English language. All of
us must come to know our common history, heritage, and American heroes,
so we can get our great Melting Pot working its magic again. Any man or
woman from any continent or any country can be a good American. We know
that. But it takes time to assimilate the thirty million who have come
in the last thirty years. And we need time. Indeed, we need a time-out
on legal immigration, to ease the downward pressure on workers' wages and
to defeat the forces of separatism that threaten us and nations all over
the world.

This land is our land; it belongs to all of us, immigrant and native-born
alike; and it would be unpardonable ingratitude if we, the children of
pioneers and patriots of every color, continent, and creed, lost this last
best hope of earth, because we could not learn to live with one another,
and could not learn to love one another.

If America stands for anything in this world, it is freedom. Yet today
America is among the most over-taxed, over-regulated, and over-governed
societies in history. Our Federal Government collects a fifth of all the
wealth we produce and controls perhaps half of it. Can anyone name a single
regulation that has been repealed in ten years, or a single agency that
has been abolished? Even the National Endowment for the Arts soldiers defiantly
on.

We need to restore the old constitutional division of labor in government.
Defense and foreign policy are the province of the federal government,
but welfare and education are the business of state and local governments.
And in children's education, parents come first, teachers second, and federal
judges not at all.

Mr. Bush says his Department of Education will write tests for fourth
grade children in Idaho. But if I am elected president, the bureaucrats
at the Department of Education are not going to be testing kids; they're
going to be testing the magic of the market place. And all federal money
for the school children of America will be sent back to the school districts
of America, where accountability begins and authority belongs.

We need a new Supreme Court where only constitutionalists need apply,
a court that will respect both states rights and human rights, that will
begin to undo the damage done this nation by judicial aggressions, beginning
with that abomination they call Roe v. Wade.

We need a President and a Congress that will pick up the whip the Founding
Fathers left in Article III of the Constitution-to herd the justices back
into the narrow stalls to which they were first consigned by Hamilton and
Madison.

What is a self-governing people doing, waiting meekly each week for
nine jurists to tell us how we may govern ourselves? As our fathers threw
off a tyranny of kings, let us throw off this tyranny of judges-and let
America be America again!

As for our IRS tax code, it is an insult to a free people, the product
of an endless series of corrupt bargains between lobbyists and legislators.
Let us rip this weed out by its roots, cut taxes to the lowest level in
modern history, eliminate taxes on savers and small business, and shift
the burden where it belongs, on a transnational elite that has no loyalty
to any country.

For every tax on manufactured goods that are made in the U.S.A, let
us put an equal tax on foreign goods dumped in the U.S.A. For every tariff
China puts on us, let us put an equal tariff on them. That way, Mr. Clinton's
campaign contributors down at the Chinese embassy can start contributing
to the upkeep of the Seventh Fleet.

Friends, ours is truly the best of times and the worst of times. With
our miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology, none of us
would want to go back to yesterday. But something good has been lost from
those years as well: The old patriotism, a popular culture that undergirded
the values of faith, family, and country, the idea that we Americans are
a people who sacrifice and suffer together, and go forward together, the
mutual respect, the sense of limits, the good manners; all are gone. My
life has been spent in the great and good vocations of politics, journalism,
and government. None commands the respect it once did; all today are in
disrepute.

I cannot think of a time since Watergate, so poisoned with rancor and
hostility, and I don't know if any president can change that, the way Ronald
Reagan infused his time with his spirit and unabashed love of country.
But I do know this: I will try.

America needs a Government of National Unity and Reconciliation that
draws from the best of all parties, and I promise you: I will create that
kind of government. And if we build it, they will come.

My friends, all the great empires of Europe that began our century so
full of swagger and bombast came crashing down to ruin. All are now surrendering
their identities and their independence to a super state that pays homage
to the god of Mammon. America alone still endures, independent and free.
The great questions before us are these: Shall we, too, yield to their
temptation, follow their path, and suffer their fate? Is the call to empire
irresistible? Is a world government inevitable? Or can America remain forever
a light unto the nations, an example to mankind of how a free people should
govern themselves, a republic above whose sovereignty stands the sovereignty
of God alone.

That is our cause. And so it is that in the name of the Founding Fathers,
we go forth to rescue America, and we will not quit this fight as long
as there is breath within us.